‘It is David and Goliath,” complained Andrew Berman to NY 1 about his Greenwich Village group’s drive to derail New York University’s expansion plans. Berman and his allies might be surprised to see how easily Goliath can be taken down — at least on the other side of the world.
A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education summed up NYU’s attitude in the United Arab Emirates, where it launched a campus five years ago: “NYU-Abu Dhabi Behaves Like a Careful Guest in a Foreign Land.”
The UAE doesn’t exactly have a strong reputation for protecting academic freedom — or freedom of any sort. A lecturer at a Sorbonne campus there recently spent nine months in jail after being charged with insulting government officials and inciting others to break the law: He’d posted online calls for government reform. NYU’s officials declined to comment on the case.
In April, Human Rights Watch asked, “Is NYU going to advertise the magnificence of studying in Abu Dhabi while the government persecutes an academic for his political beliefs?”
The answer might be in what the editor of the student newspaper at the NYU-Abu Dhabi campus told the Chronicle: “We’re not here to cause trouble.” When was the last time you heard that from an American college journalist? Or any American college student?
But she was clearly taking her cue from NYU President John Sexton, who told the (London) Times Higher Education Supplement about his university’s attitude in the UAE, “We shouldn’t behave there the same way you behave in Greenwich Village or Piccadilly in London. . . It’s about being sensitive to your cultural environment.”
For decades students (and boomer generation administrators) have assumed that the purpose of college is to cause trouble — “Question authority” and all that. At one liberal-arts school’s freshman convocation a few years ago, the dean told students that if the college accomplished what their parents wanted it to, the faculty and administrators had failed.
But the whole college rebellion thing only works in America, apparently. Researchers in the UAE, according to the Chronicle, “use caution in broaching topics such as AIDS and prostitution, the status of migrant laborers; Israel and the Holocaust; and domestic politics and corruption.”
Wouldn’t want to annoy the royal family by suggesting the Holocaust actually happened or that Israel has a right to exist.
This fall, Yale will get to compete with NYU in the pandering-to-despots sweepstakes. The Ivy is launching a satellite campus in Singapore, where homosexuality is illegal, speech is significantly restricted and vandalism is an offense punishable by caning.
When Yale’s faculty passed a resolution recently condemning the “lack of respect for civil and political rights in the state of Singapore,” Richard Levin, the school’s president, said that the resolution “carried a sense of moral superiority that I found unbecoming.”
An Ivy League president complaining about moral smugness? That’s another first, on top of those establishment-appeasing student journalists.
The explanation for the anomalies, of course, is cash: Campuses abroad bring oodles of wealth to the universities that sponsor them, and allow administrators to wow prospective students (more money!) with patter about globalization and how this school will prepare them for cosmopolitan 21st-century careers.
Then, too, modern campus functionaries have all drunk the multicultural Kool-Aid: They “know” we have nothing to teach Singapore or the UAE about democracy and civil rights.
Huffington Post regular Nicolaus Mills, a professor at Sarah Lawrence College, calls NYU and Yale “imperial universities” for their overseas gigs. The problem there is that the old imperialists at least claimed to be spreading civilization. Today’s elite colleges, by contrast, assume that the places they’re “colonizing” actually know best.
Naomi Schaefer Riley writes frequently on religion, education and culture.